Unsettling Womyn’s Land: Property, Sovereignty, and the Radical Imagination of Lesbian Feminist Thought
My dissertation project, Unsettling Womyn’s Land, is an interdisciplinary approach to the history and legacy of the womyn’s land movement in the United States. Defined by their communal and at times separatist politics, womyn’s lands emerged from radical cultures of the long 1970s as refuges from sexism and homophobia within movement spaces and the world writ large. Although womyn’s lands aspired to become spaces of womyn’s liberation, the challenges posed by the economic constraints of life in rural areas, struggles over how to negotiate the land-holding practices created by settler colonial and racial capitalist structures of property, and ongoing debates over gender and biological essentialism continue to serve as sites of conflict within movement discourse. This project enters the fray of debates around womyn’s lands to consider how questions about land and feminism speak to ongoing issues within radical cultures in the U.S. context, as well as how they offer lessons for our current moment when many Americans are re-assessing their relationships to land and the environment.
Mapping the Radical Feminist Universe in the United States, 1965 - 1980.
As part of my archival research practice, I began work to create a social network map of the broader universe of radical feminism in the United States in the long 1970s. This project arose out of a particular research problem: given the highly-networked organizing of radical feminism and lesbian cultures more broadly, I found that it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of how all of the names I was coming upon in the archive related to one another. Currently a work-in-progress, this project will situate womyn connected with radical feminism within a broader context of activism and organizing during that time period. If you have questions about this project or would like to learn more, please reach out to me at my UNC email - kcampbe2 (at) live.unc.edu.
In addition to my work mapping histories of radical feminism, I am also interested in social network mapping as it relates to queer methods and methodologies. In my current work, I am beginning to take up questions about ethical considerations related to the digital reassembly of archival material depicting social and/or political relationships between persons who have been the subjects of state surveillance.
I occasionally network map recreationally. You can find my network map of the Elephant 6 Collective — an experimental music scene based in Athens, Georgia that first sparked my fascination as a teenager — here.